What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (108 page)

Black Rod, Sir Freddie Viggers, was another great character and a very nice fellow. However, he really put the wind up me about the ennoblement ceremony. He explained in detail exactly where you walk, where you stand, when you have to bow, what you have to say, whose hand you have to shake. When someone explains it so intently, you start to worry that because it's such an awesome thing, you might fluff it or do something wrong.

The ennoblement was on 20 July 2009. I took the opportunity of inviting the whole family and some friends to lunch at the House of Lords' River Restaurant and then to watch me being sworn in. I'd have to dress up in
ceremonial robes and be sponsored by two other peers, Baroness Vadera and Lord Davis, who would walk me into the chamber. I would read out my pledge to the House, then leave the chamber after shaking the hand of the Lady Speaker.

At the lunch, my grandson Nathan, then sixteen, proposed a toast to the Queen and Nick Hewer, as usual, made a little speech. When I stood up to speak to my family and friends, I was overcome with the moment and started to feel a bit emotional, thinking of my mum and dad. I mentioned that it was a shame they weren't there and that was nearly enough to bring a tear to my eyes again.

My brother-in-law Harold Regal, with a mischievous glint in his eye, couldn't resist saying, 'Not bad, Alan - better than being a dustman, I guess.' It was the last time I heard Harold's lifelong joke about me being a dustman, as sadly he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer earlier in the year and he passed away a few months later.

In between hosting the lunch and dressing up in my robes, I arranged for photographs to be taken with me and the family. Louise told me that when we went into the chamber to have photographs taken with my robes on, Derek was very touched, seeing his little brother standing there in the House of Lords, all dressed up.

Then it was time for the ceremony and most of my guests were escorted to the gallery to watch it. Ann, being a new peer's wife, was allowed to go into the main chamber. We had arranged wheelchairs for Harold and my father-in-law Johnnie, who by now, at the age of eighty-seven, was becoming frail. They were positioned at the entrance of the chamber, watching as the very formal procession of me and the others passed by. What with being wound up by Black Rod, I was nervous and didn't know what to expect. When I glimpsed these two men, who had known me for so many years, out of the corner of my eye as we turned into the grand entrance of the main chamber, again my life kind of flashed in front of me and I started to choke up a bit. As I walked by, Johnnie called out, 'Good luck, Alan.' He kind of looked me up and down in my robes and if I didn't know any better, I'd say it was a look that said, All right, you've made your point - you
are
good enough for my daughter.'

In the end, the ceremony, which lasted no more than five minutes, was a piece of cake and I ended up wondering what all the fuss was about. It was very simple. I walked in, watched the Garter drop his baton, moved round, read out my piece and followed the Garter out with my two sponsors, and that was it - no big deal. The introduction of a new peer is always dealt with
at the start of a sitting in the Lords and is conducted rather swiftly, so that the main business of the day can get underway.

Once the ceremony was over, to consummate the fact that I was now a member of the House of Lords, protocol dictated that I had to de-robe, then come back into the chamber and sit down on the benches to listen to ten minutes or so of the debate. I was then able to go out again and meet the family and friends to wish them farewell. Ann and I went straight from the House of Lords to Stansted airport, as we were flying to Spain for a couple of weeks' holiday.

As we left London and I reflected on the great day, I tuned into Sky News on my car's TV to see them mention that it was on
this
day, exactly forty years ago - 20 July 1969 - that Apollo 11 had landed on the moon. I could clearly remember standing in Rex Radio, an electrical retailer in Kilburn, watching the moon-landing on one of the black-and-white TVs in the shop. Back then, the thought of Alan Sugar landing in the House of Lords would have seemed equally miraculous.

*

Prior to my formal introduction to the House of Lords, I'd visited the DBIS and was introduced by Shriti Vadera to the two members of staff who would be assisting me, Paul Hadley and Richard Callard. Paul, a rather tall fellow, was very formal and correct. He was a stickler for detail and worried about breaking any rules of protocol. He was always trying to pre-empt aggravation and examined the implications of anything I wanted to do or say - a real Mr Safety. Richard was a younger fellow, about my height, and as a qualified accountant at a large accountancy firm had been seconded to the department. He came across as being quite streetwise. Both of them were a great help in bedding me into Civil Service ways. Part of the deal agreed with the BBC was that I should not have my own office with my name on the door - pathetic, I know. However, I
was
allowed a desk and the use of a computer, and I was located on the same floor as Paul and Richard.

I started to get to grips with the areas in which I could be useful, mainly to do with the Business Link Centres the government ran. These are organisations where they have experts, gurus, mentors, call them what you will, that small businesses can approach to ask for advice. I didn't want to form any opinions too quickly, but I did initially wonder why, if these mentors were so good at dishing out advice, they were working in some government department. Why weren't they out working for themselves? Who were they - a bunch of ex-bank managers or retired accountants? And what kind of advice would they be giving?

I agreed to embark on a round-Britain trip to look at some of these Business Link Centres, just to get an idea of what they do. I'd listen in at their call centres, talk to some of their business advisers and meet the companies they were advising. I wanted to get a flavour of what was going on.

It certainly opened my eyes to what was available for small businesses. I quickly realised that these Business Link Centres were indeed very useful, if a little over-staffed. Obviously they weren't there to give people business ideas; they were there to support and advise businesses on questions they had about matters like VAT, import and export, how to collect money from their customers, how they should approach banks, how to prepare business models and spreadsheets, all that type of stuff. The people seeking advice would have to have the seed of an idea themselves. They couldn't jump out of bed one Monday morning, phone up a Business Link Centre and say, 'Hello, I'd like to be in business, please. I fancy running an airline or being a dot-com millionaire - can you tell me what to do?' Believe it or not, the Business Link Centres
did
get naive calls like this, so first and foremost we needed to make sure we projected the Centres in such a way that people understood exactly what they were there for and did not have unrealistic expectations.

Paul and Richard had also arranged a fashion parade of the banks for me, as I wanted to find out whether they really were helping small- to medium-sized businesses. Clearly the banks had been beaten up badly as a result of the irresponsible lending which had led to the recent financial disaster and the subsequent injection of money from the government. They were obviously very nervous and now, when they lent money, they were making doubly sure their risks were minimised. In tightening their belts, there were some genuine stories of small businesses being squeezed - their overdrafts were being taken away, or renegotiated, or changed into long-term loans. It was true that some of the banks
had
taken liberties, but by the time I arrived on the scene and got stuck into the details, I discovered that this poor treatment had been for a short period of time, following the banking disaster when, as one would expect, the banks went into protective mode.

I also noticed a wave of complaints which, in my opinion, were unreasonable. Some companies were hooking on to the fact that the banks wouldn't lend them money and accusing them of stunting the growth of their businesses. When I examined some of these businesses, I agreed with the banks - I too wouldn't have lent them a penny. In fact, no one in their right mind would have! In some cases, these businesses were virtually bankrupt - they were simply hiding behind this fashionable trend of blaming the banks.

I spent quite a lot of time looking into this and eventually advised the
government that while there
was
an initial problem with banks not lending, one needed to understand that there was also a lot of propaganda from companies who really weren't worthy of being lent a penny. We needed to see the wood for the trees before beating up the banks too much over their alleged lack of co-operation.

Regrettably, I'd alienated most of the DBIS staff through my Sky TV interview. In hindsight, having met hundreds of people at the DBIS, I realised most were giving expert advice to businesses, even though they weren't businesspeople themselves. I quite liked floating around the various floors and talking to them, listening to them and seeing what they do. It was a great learning curve. I'm one of those people who feel you have to earn your wings and you only do that by face-to-face discussions with people.

Throughout the rest of the year, I embarked upon a series of seminars around the country, visiting major towns like Manchester, Nottingham and Bristol. We invited audiences of around 800 people each day over two sessions, the idea simply being that I would answer people's questions, giving them some advice on what they could do about their businesses. Most of the time, this went very well. However, in Manchester a gentleman said he had visited three banks and they'd each turned him down. In my long answer to him, I told him that while I wasn't directing my reply to him personally, I wanted to take the opportunity to dispel the current rumour that banks weren't lending to people. I pointed out that there are many companies which don't
deserve
to be loaned money and that people were making excuses about banks to cover up the inadequacies of their businesses.

Unbeknown to me, a
Daily Mail
sniper was in the audience. I had taken the precaution of ensuring all my seminars were recorded, in anticipation of one of these journalists slipping in. I was fully prepared to take them to task if they wrote a pack of lies. In this case, the
Daily Mail,
as usual, decided to take my words out of context, resulting in a front-page headline stating that I had said, 'Eighty per cent of small businesses in this country are not worth lending money to.' It was an outrageous distortion of the truth. What I'd actually said was that we had sampled a small number of cases where businesses had been turned down for loans and that 80 per cent of
those
cases were justified in not being lent a penny - a completely different scenario. Nevertheless, they ran the lie on their front page and predictably it caused uproar amongst organisations such as the Federation of Small Businesses. It escalated into questions being asked in the House of Lords and in the House of Commons.

For the Conservatives, this was manna from heaven. There were
questions to the ministers about whether 'Lord Sugar speaks on behalf of the government'. I was a bit disappointed that the ministers answering those questions hadn't been fully briefed that the newspaper had lied. If they
had
been, the simple answer would have been, 'We have read what has been printed in the newspaper and we assume that your questions arise from that. Our simple answer is that it's a pack of lies. There is a recording of Lord Sugar's seminars and we can verify that he did not say that and, therefore, we have nothing to answer.'

Instead, they were poorly prepared and gave some waffle of an answer. I was quite disappointed. You'd have thought that these people would have known by now what mischief-makers the media are, but it appeared to me that they also believed what they had read and were somewhat embarrassed trying to answer questions thrown at them by the opposition - a ridiculous scenario. I protested heavily, through Paul and Richard, that in future, having gone to all the trouble of recording these seminars, they should ensure that ministers' staff were briefed in a much better way and should consult with them first when asked questions about my activities.

The only consolation was that the
Daily Mail
was so far up David Cameron's arse at the time that I guess any sensible person reading its coverage of me over the preceding months would have realised how totally biased they were. They'd gone so dramatically over the top in hounding me that normal and sane people must have been thinking to themselves, 'What
is
all this Alan Sugar stuff they're always banging on about? They're going a bit crazy.' I would say - and I think the rest of Fleet Street would say - that they made complete idiots of themselves.

When I compare the hostile media coverage of my entry into the political world with what I experienced in the football days,
this
type of sniping was different. In the football days, it was conducted by thick idiots who wrote for the tabloids; the snipers here were at a higher intellectual level.

Paul and Richard were bombarded with questions under the Freedom of Information Act about everything I was doing. All these enquiries came from the opposition offices. They must have had loads of people sitting there dreaming up all kinds of questions and hoping for an answer which revealed some juicy story they could hand over to the media. At first Paul and Richard showed me these questions. Then they saw me getting wound up and starting to get involved in replying, so in the end they didn't even bother showing them to me. They got the measure of me and simply batted the questions away, as most of them were rubbish.